I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) at the Niels Bohr Institute. My work is in galaxy formation and evolution — how galaxies assemble their stellar mass across cosmic history, and the role of the underlying dark-matter structure in driving that evolution, through large multi-band imaging surveys with JWST, Hubble, Euclid and Roman.
A scroll-driven tour of how I measure dark-matter halos from galaxy surveys — from photometry to clustering to the stellar-to-halo mass relation.
Populate halos with galaxies, drag three knobs — M_min, M₁, α — and watch the two-point correlation function update in real time.
Galaxies are the lighthouses of cosmic structure. They live inside invisible halos of dark matter whose assembly is determined by gravity alone — and so by comparing the galaxies we can see with the halos we can infer, we can read the co-evolution of baryons and dark matter across thirteen billion years.
My work sits at the intersection of large extragalactic surveys and the statistical frameworks that turn photometry into physics. I led the production of the COSMOS2025 catalogue — photometry, morphology, redshifts and physical parameters for over 700,000 galaxies in the COSMOS-Web JWST survey — and develop open-source tools (halogal) for modelling the galaxy–halo connection via stellar-to-halo mass relations, halo occupation distributions and abundance matching.
I'm increasingly interested in simulation-based inference and other machine-learning approaches to extragalactic statistics, and in pushing the galaxy–halo connection to the highest redshifts with JWST, Euclid and Roman.
Model predictions and fitting for galaxy–halo observables — UVLF, SMF, SFRD, stellar-mass density, two-point correlation functions and the stellar-to-halo mass relation, with MCMC fitting and tutorials.
→The official COSMOS-Web multi-band catalogue: photometry, morphology, photometric redshifts and physical parameters for 700,000+ galaxies across 37 bands, 0.3–8 μm.
→Stellar mass function measurements in COSMOS-Web, with Python notebook tutorials reproducing the paper figures.
→Stellar-to-halo mass measurements from COSMOS2020 — HOD modelling of clustering and abundance, fitting code, and release products.
→SourceXtractor++ morphological catalogues for 300,000+ galaxies across every major public JWST survey, hosted on the DAWN JWST Archive.
→Everything else — survey utilities, photo-z experiments, football-analytics side projects, and the source of this site.
→I'm happy to discuss Master's and Bachelor's project supervision in extragalactic astrophysics — galaxy surveys, photometric catalogues, the galaxy–halo connection, and machine-learning methods applied to large-scale structure.
If you'd like to work on something in this space, send me a short note about your background and what excites you. I'm based at the Niels Bohr Institute / DAWN in Copenhagen.
Email. markoshuntov@gmail.com
Post. Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen,
Jagtvej 155 A, DK-2200 Copenhagen N, Denmark.
Also at. Google Scholar · ORCID · ADS · GitHub · LinkedIn.